I picked our next path at random. This one was a door to the... left hand path. After two clear sets of teleportation and an unknowable amount of non-obvious ones we could be facing any cardinal direction. Consultation with my compass may have granted insight, but one direction was as good as the other for now.

  The door disagreed with my choice, and resisted the ogre’s attack with alacrity.

  My own spells were stronger.

  Scorch, Sword, Scintillation II

  But not strong enough. The sword set the stone humming and the whole dungeon erupted in howls from the screeching cacophony. Footsteps sounded in the distance, but none of the close. Any creatures we might have attracted—knights, gnomes, taurs—were now dead or drive off.

  Most creatures.

  A few moments later the door we’d failed to knock down swung forward. We’d pushed when we should have pulled.

  The little pixie stepped out. He’d somehow obtained clothes. A smart little tunic with tights and a long pointed hat on his head.

  “There you are! Awake already, ready to dance in the meadow and run through the trees! I have fixed your ring, dear Oswic. Come, try it on!”

  He skipped up to me and stopped an arm’s (my arm) length away from me. I bent and took the proffered ring.

  The metal was thinner to compensate for its new size, but he’d tapped out the twist so cleverly with his hammers I could only see the marks because I knew what to look for. I slid the ring over the middle finger of my left hand. It was near imperceptibly tight, but still fit well. I presumed it would fit perfectly over my ring finger, but pixies were still mischievous creatures despite their kind hearts. There was no telling who I’d end up married to.

  The pixie clapped in delight, “Is all restored? Is this portion of our bargain complete?”

  I concentrated, and immediately my mind was flooded with an image of my surroundings, the insides of my body and the two others, and dirt between the flagstones beneath our feet.

  I winced. It was a double edged power. Nothing came free, and all blessings were best treated with caution.

  Including the four remaining gifts.

  The pixie looked up with large eyes at the both of us. His hat wobbled and bobbled gently as his head turned back and forth to even spread his joy between us.

  “Favours given, favours restored! What next? I am ever at your service!”

  Four more favours, and I had a plan. I wouldn’t have had a plan a day ago, but thawing the pixie had also thawed something in me. As had cleaning Tom’s mother’s house. I had spent so long trying to break free from the shackles of Tom’s bargains and the mental influences of the warlocks that I’d simply been in survival mode, with little room for creativity, little room to branch out and try new ideas to aid my descent.

  But now it was as if a thick fog had finally started to dissipate under the sun’s brilliant regard. I could see further, find higher ground to look from, and from there, even higher. My mind, soul, and spirit were heading upwards, driving my body down beneath Bleakfort.

  “With Attar’s leave I have the favours in mind, though he may veto any I ask.”

  Attar smiled, “Let’s hear them. It would be a relief not to have to worry myself about wasting them.”

  The pixie tutted disapprovingly at Attar, though with a twinkle in his eye, “Favours are not wasted sir! Favours are gifts, not wishes! Speak your heart and let your heart be wrong, the divine cares not!”

  Attar tossed up his hands in defeat, “Which is why I am glad one with Oswic’s wisdom may speak his heart instead, for I would treat the favours as wishes.”

  The little pixie clutched his hands to his abdomen and bent over into a fit of giggles, then threw himself back in a gale of laughter. Attar and I both smiled politely at the spectacle until he regained control of himself.

  “What,” he giggled, “what then is,” now he was struggling to keep a straight face, “what is your wish, O Magus?”

  “Some will take longer than others. But for now, guidance to the fifth floor, if you know the way.”

  “I know the ways and more! But I shall lead you to the stairs. Some has already been down the well, and I suspect it was you!”

  “It was.”

  He skipped to the door he’d just come through, “Then here, sirs, is our first stop!”

  The door even our strongest magic couldn’t open. For the first time I regretted the loss of my hammer and spikes.

  “Would you happen to have a ghost who can keep the door open? Perhaps with nails to drive into the stone?”

  Attar shook his head, “No such luck. I have a hundred spirits who I must have repaired while I was trapped in that book, but the past- future- the other me didn’t think of needing something so esoteric.”

  The darkness beyond the door yawned, stretched to every horizon and then, just as my vision was going dark, a minute star stretched and grew from the very centre. The star continued to stretch outwards, widening in every direction, until it filled the whole doorway, until it stretched beyond and filled my vision with light. A blazing star rose in the darkest depths of the dungeon, and then the darkness collapsed, and the star was gone.

  I blinked the light scars from my eyes. I already had several uses in mind for the new spell possibility. I dug my wax out from my pack, then grabbed the one foot pole while I was in there.

  The pixie was waiting expectantly. There wasn’t enough room next to the hinge, the door was too flush for that, but I laid the pole at the corner perpendicular to the threshold, so the door couldn’t close without another’s intervention. It might hold.

  “Ready.”

  The pixie led us straight down the corridor, ignoring the dead end to our left and the strange, endless, spiralling design to our right. I had troubles tearing my gaze away. Something about it promised more than knowledge. Understanding. There was meaning here. There was—

  “This way my good fellows!” the pixie called. He alone was unaffected by the spiral. I blinked and tore myself away. That was to be my final favour. Something to resist the endless attempts at altering my thoughts in this dungeon.

  The corridor was about fifty feet in length, ending with a sturdy looking wooden door which the pixie fearlessly unlatched and opened.

  I couldn’t tell if the room was a tomb or a torture chamber.

  Yellowed bones were scattered about the room. Stone sarcophagi stood open, many only containing tattered rags. A drain waited in one corner. The whole floor, most stained reddish brown, sloped towards the drain. One wall was covered in a bed of spikes. Against another, a table waited, bearing tongs, knives, screws, and... was that a tool for shaping leather boots? I could only hope the torturer had been fixing his shoes between sessions.

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  Shackles waited on all five of the room’s walls, though none were in use. The entire room seemed old. Perhaps it was even older than the warlocks. They had little use for torture as anything other than a hobby. Their magics would allow extraction of information from any mind.

  “Dreadful, this room is,” the pixie shook his head, though he appeared more excited then sombre, “But we cannot enter it, could not if we wanted to. Observe!”

  He skipped forward and vanished.

  Another of the strange teleportation chambers then. This one was nearly ten feet out into the room. They didn’t need doorways after all.

  “You go first,” I said to Attar, “In case we can’t get back.”

  Attar stepped exactly in the pixie’s little footsteps, his own short legs looked like they were shuffling shyly along the ground. When he reached the same arbitrary point the pixie had, he vanished.

  This was why I’d wanted guidance through the fourth floor. No map would have aided us. Conan’s was already completely useless. Something had changed here. I suspected Myrra or her house were to blame.

  I followed after the little necromancer and my sword and fireball followed after me.

  We were in an enormous room. Bigger than any I’d ever been in. I couldn’t even see the whole thing under the influence of my light, and much of it curved away to the left in the distance.

  The ceiling was arranged like one quarter of a pyramid. Both sections of the L shaped room had their own ceiling, which rose upwards from about 15 feet in height at the far corner, to so high my light couldn’t reach the roof by the corner. Even my rubied eyes struggled to pick out the highest point.

  If the two perpendicular sides of the room were each viewed as their own rectangle, then the centre of our rectangle contained a Delta king’s funerary barge. Not literally, but armour, weapons, and treasure lay about the room, artfully framing the plinth at the centre.

  A woman stood on the slab, purplish and bloated, with a bundle of bloodied rags shoved into her mouth. Her right eye was closed, unmoving, as though sleeping or dead, but her left was wide and wild, locked on our party of intruders.

  Attar had already summoned his ogres, “What is that creature? Her soul is malevolent. I didn’t think such a thing could be possible.”

  For once, I had more knowledge of the dead than Attar. Perhaps such creatures were not found along the Bronze Coast, but every child was warned of the revenants in the Painted Lands, and even in the Vineyards beyond. We all knew to not let animals leap over the corpse of the dead and to treat all their wounds with boiling water lest they return.

  “She is a vampire. A literally godless soul. A creature who drinks the blood of the living to take their spirit for its own. Ever hungry. Ever spiteful. I’ve heard tales of hundreds being slain, whole villages wiped out, by those who didn’t act fast enough.”

  Attar swallowed. The pixie listened politely, though did nothing to aid or flee.

  “So we should kill her?” asked Attar.

  “If we can. I’ve heard stories of it taking ten strong men to restrain a vampire. She must be decapitated or staked through the mouth. With aspen, preferably. Then we can perform a rite to send her soul on to the afterlife.”

  “That I can do. Such is my duty as a necromancer. Where are we going to get aspen?”

  “I’ll decapitate her. Your needles through her heart may also work, but I don’t want you to get that close.”

  The vampire hadn’t yet moved from her plinth. Instead she swayed atop the slab, chewing angrily at the linen caught her in mouth. The sight filled me with revulsion. She looked drowned, though drowning could also destroy vampires. Her glare was an accusation, a reprimand against the crime of living when she had died. I’d done nothing to deserve it. It was hard not to feel anger myself under such hateful regard.

  I readied my wax, with my fingers splayed through my spellbook. There were more ways still to incapacitate a vampire, ones I’d only heard rumours of, so I hadn’t spoken them aloud.

  Handcannon. I summoned the spell directly against the vampire’s belly and fired. The vampire screeched and clutched at her abdomen. Such was her strength that only an initial volley of gas and liquid escaped before she sealed the wound with her palm.

  Handcannon II: An invisible handcannon fires in the direction of the caster’s choosing.

  I hadn’t written a spell so hastily in several weeks. Taking less than an hour was the only way a Magus could fail under normal circumstances, within the dungeon the danger was magnified immensely. But now, as the vampire leapt the fifty foot gap between us in a single bound, I was glad to have a second shot. Which is why I’d taken the risk.

  Barricade

  The vampire crashed into the wall fast enough to break every bone in her body. If my wall had been true stone, perhaps she may have even cracked it. The sound reminded me of crushing autumnal leaves. Oddly satisfying.

  She fell to the ground and landed on her feet, already recovered from the impact. She rushed forward again, the wall was invisible after all, and was stopped short. I’d managed to summon it low enough to prevent her from walking under it while still being able to catch her in the air.

  Of course, the ceiling here was hundreds of feet high so she could simply leap over it, but she didn’t know that yet, and I wasn’t going to give her the opportunity to find out.

  Handcannon II

  I summoned my second hand cannon on the opposite side of abdomen, where the bullet path might leave a perpendicular trail through her body. If we could deflate her, we might immobilize her for enough time to send her soul away. Bullets for some reason were supposedly uniquely suitable for this sort of job.

  She screamed as the cannon tore through her, but just like the first wound managed to clamp down over the entry hole before the rotten blood within her escaped. There was no exit wound. Vampires were tough.

  My sword and fireball had been useless against the door, but a vampire was a different matter. I sent them soaring over my invisible wall. The sword went straight for her neck. The fire ball flew to the far side of her, hoping to hem her between the fire and the wall. Though I’d heard no stories specifically recommending fire to deal with vampires, all dark creatures feared the light.

  She ducked under the blade before it could slice her, perhaps hearing the air as it whistled past. In order to control the strength of ten men in a single small feminine frame her senses would have to be far sharper than normal. Vampires were famously slow, skulking, shamblers, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t use their strength for speed if their hunger and hatred were aroused.

  She clearly couldn’t see my spells, for now, as she ducked a second and third swipe of my sword, she felt along the wall I’d summoned to span the whole fifty foot wide section of the room. Her attempts bore fruit faster than I would have liked.

  Her foot kicked out and met air.

  Instantly, she dropped to all fours and scuttled like a rat under the wall. If only I could drop it on her.

  ?Push VIII?

  Spells could be cast on spells but even ?Push VIII? didn’t have the force to move 15,000 cubic feet of stone.

  Just as I cast the spell the door halfway between myself and the vampire to my left opened and a skeleton tottered out. He raised a hand and cast the spell again on the vampire.

  Though unbelievably strong, she was not as strong as the beetles. The combined powers of the spells flattened her. Blood poured from the wounds in her abdomen as it was forced out, and once again I heard the *crack* *crack* *crack* of autumn leaves.

  “Quickly now!” I called to Attar and ran to the incapacitated vampire.

  My wall vanished as my sword swept out to decapitate the villain. The ogre had overpowered a similar situation, but vampires had no dark reserves to pull on. Their inimical nature already forced them to act on stolen time.

  Her head rolled free, no longer under the influence of my spell, as the spell targeted her body, not her head. The target was not set in stone, but such was nature, even in its transcendent form, that its actions sought the path which followed most sensibly. If her head could fly and gnash with bat-like ears, her body would have instead been freed.

  I picked up her head by her hair, careful of her teeth and glare, and stuffed her head backwards, facing away from her body, with the back resting against her buttocks.

  “Give her her last rites.”

  Attar nodded and bowed over the corpse, watching something I couldn’t see. I could now activate my necromancer sight, but it felt wrong to fulfill a simple curiosity during a funeral.

  “If you could say the words,” Attar said, “I am not of these lands. I will guide her soul, but someone who shares her home would be best to close the circle.”

  A funeral with the proper arrangements (head under buttocks, stake in mouth, or needles in heart) would dissipate her soul after a few days. With Attar we could do it in minutes.

  I shut myself off from my ring and closed my eyes. No ceremony could be run on appearances alone. Darkness and self reflection were part of the ritual.

  “May you rest as we send you on. May you find that divine spark you are so desperately looking for, in the place where it is meant to be; not taken from others, but found within yourself. Seek redemption, and we will pray for your redemption. Seek the spirit, and the spirit will be found. Grant yourself peace, and go in peace. Sleep well.”

  She would not find the Elysian fields. Not this time. But perhaps on the next cycle. The acorn became the tree which dropped the acorn which became the tree, and each tree was taller than the last. So it had always been. So it would be.